Tag Archives: Welsh

I can not believe I did it, but I did and I am so proud of my self! I was waiting and waiting for Aron to send me the Welsh translation of the song I wrote called “No Feeling” and he never sent me the full translation. Soooooooooo, I found a web site that translates for you. It is done, including pronunciations, which took me 2 hours by itself. It does no good to write the words down if you can’t sing them properly. Well, it’s done! It is now called “Dim Taymlad”. The only thing I haven’t done is sat down and actually played/sang it in Welsh, which I will do tomorrow. I am so happy, and I am even more pleased that I did it myself. The real test comes when I sing it in public, hopefully someone won’t come and tell me I have been singing about a cow in the barn that needs milked LOL:) It was a great day my friends…..WEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee 🙂

Like this:

The wind is really blowing today so I will be spending my day indoors. I feel like I can accomplish a lot today! I am going to spend my day working on music today and making a lasagna, YUM!!!!!!!!!! My friend in Wales, Aron Elias, is sending me the translation of a song I wrote into Welsh from English and i am looking forward to hear what it sounds like in Welsh. I am also going to spend today translating Llongau Caernarfon back in to Welsh. So those are my plans for the day. I hope this day finds you happy and well 🙂 With that I leave you with Simon and Garfunkel…

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.” ― Benjamin Franklin

The weather was not cooperating yesterday, so the only thing I accomplished was to secure a PT/FT job with a local house painter. It was completely unnessesary for me to get a job, but I wanted to have a little something extra to achieve some personal goals over the next few months. The writing has been slow the last two weeks and the only other thing on my plate really is working on the acoustic project. I found a Fleetwood Mac song that I am going to do called “I Don’t Want To Know” and I have asked a friend of mine to translate a song I wrote into Welsh for me. The only other thing is I am translating Llongau Caernarfon back from English to Welsh. It’s beautiful outside so I am taking mom to get her haircut and then I think we are going to go to lunch. After that it’s back into the painter’s whites I go, I roll, I roll, it’s painting the house I roll….LOL 🙂 With that I leave you with FM…..

As some of you may know Mike and I are preparing for a gig at The Crescent Brewery on the 29th of December. We are playing from 8-11 and are doing 3 sets. It has been my goal to make this set list the strongest we have done yet as an acoustic duo. We are playing many blues songs and songs from the 60’s and 70’s. Just for fun I added in a great song by the Violent Femmes. I have also added in a song I have wanted to do for the longest time, “If You Could Only See” By Tonic. As well as the usual suspects we are also doing a few Welsh folk songs that some are sung in Welsh, some are macaronic, 1/2 Welsh and 1/2 English, and some are in English. Probably the parts of the set list I am most happy about are the 3 originals that I wrote and the original that Mike and I wrote together. I finally finished up the last of the changes on “No Feeling” which is our joint compilation. First I transposed it and then I added a capo on the second fret to bring it up to the key I wanted the song in. I am really pleased with the originals. 2 of them, “Journey” and “Make You See” were songs I wrote over 12 years ago and the other 2 were written this last year. For me the song writing process is either really fast, or very painfully slow. It took me over 6 months to lock down “Empty” and “No Feeling”. “Empty” has always been complete as far as the chord progressions went, what took so long was the vocal melody lines. It took over 6 months to find the vocal melody line that I was happy with and then I had to lock it in my head to where I could actually hear the melody line without actually hearing the music. I finally got it locked in this last week. So we are rehearsing every night and getting ready. Acoustic duos take much more work because every mistake is painfully obvious, you don’t have a bunch of other background noise to cover up when you make a mistake, hence the extra rehearsal time. On that note the full 5 piece is back in rehearsals tonight getting ready for the New Year’s Eve gig and life is very good…. 🙂

Dolly at all about lemon has the theme of Christmas for December. Although the song I picked doesn’t actually say Christmas in it it is an old folk Welsh tune that has been popularized around Christmas time. In Welsh it is called Ar Hyd y Nos, which translates to “All Through the Night” in English and I thought I would share it with you. It was one of the songs I sang at The Celtic Festival this last summer. So without further ado….

Hello all! I know I have been absent the last few weeks. I have had an absolutely insane rehearsal schedule getting ready for these big festivals. One down and one more to go on the 29th and then my schedule will mellow out. I hope! I have missed reading everyone’s blogs, it’s like missing my morning paper and cup of coffee. I hope this blog finds everyone healthy and happy. I have been so busy that I didn’t even notice the You Jivin Me, Turkey? had re-blogged my song “Of This Land”. Thank you so much for that, I am really glad you liked it enough to re-blog it, you’re the bomb baby! I had a few minutes today between rehearsals to post and let everyone know what I am up to. After a very hard 2 month song search I have finally come up with 15 songs for the Celtic Festival. They are going to be a mix of songs from folk Welsh songs to songs by Welsh musicians that are well known in America. I am excited about the song choice and the festival, but let me tell you, learning to sing in Welsh is no easy task! I have missed you all and will try to catch up on some of your blogs today….Peace, as always my friends, Jaz

My family comes from Cowbridge, Glamorganshire, Wales. One has to wonder what drunken Welshman sat beside this one particular bridge on one particular day and came up with the name for this town? Were there imaginary cows crossing this bridge, drunkenly weaving their way across to the other side of the greener grass on the other side? Ok, enough about that! I am booked to play a Scottish Festival at the end of September and I am representing the Welsh musicians of Idaho, so I have decided to do 12 traditional Welsh songs. Now mind you, the chords aren’t terribly difficult. They are beautiful to me, some have a very haunting Celtic lilt that I just love. What is hard is the language. I am going to sing at least one in Welsh, if not more and the pronunciation is difficult at best. It is a challenge but if my Grandma and Grandpa could be here to see this they would be so proud!